In Rails 4, as you may know, we all need to start using the Stabby Lambda (->). However, this makes scopes even more similar to plain old class methods. Carlos Antonio wrote up a great blog post comparing the two.

Brandon Hilkert emailed us over the weekend to let us know about Sucker Punch, a new single-process Ruby asynchronous processing library. It sits on top of Celluloid, the Actor-based concurrent object framework, allowing you to do asynchronous processing from within a single process.

Rolf Timmermans just wrote a post on voormedia’s blog about using immutable data structures to create a search API in Ruby. Since immutable data structures can’t be changed after they’re created, they are useful in creating efficient syntax trees that share nodes.

It’s time once again for the Ruby Hero Awards, where we need your help to find those people in the community thanklessly help others and perhaps don’t get the recognition they diserve. So if you have a minute please take a moment to nominate someone by heading over to RubyHeroes.com, typing in the github username of the person you wish to nominate, and give us a reason why they deserve to win.

This episode is all about keeping your valuable gems under lock and key: gem signing, gem stockpiling, gem exploits! Also (and less thematic, but not less important) we have Homebrew testing, receiving e-mail with your app, and rails style guides.

Hold on to your butts! RubyGems got pwned. What else is going on this half of this week? Well, a new way to interrogate your arrays, some wise words about random numbers in Ruby, a multi-line memoization technique, asynchronous requests with Thin, and oh, by the way, your CSS is garbage.